Well, let's consider the damage from the impact of a rocky asteroid, 60m in diameter. Plug this into the excellent Earth Impact Effects program at http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/. Assume a velocity of 17 km/s, which they say is "typical for asteroids," and an impact angle of 45 degrees.

The calculator says:

The projectile begins to breakup at an altitude of 54000 meters = 177000 ft
The projectile bursts into a cloud of fragments at an altitude of 4700 meters = 15400 ft
The residual velocity of the projectile fragments after the burst is 4.77 km/s = 2.96 miles/s
The energy of the airburst is 4.52 x 1016 Joules = 1.08 MegaTons.
No crater is formed, although large fragments may strike the surface.

Clearly you wouldn't want to be right underneath it, but even as close as 20 km, the air blast effects seem rather anticlimactic:

I dunno why flare launchers aren't rifled. Maybe the need for accuracy in shooting a flare is low: if it goes UP, instead of sideways, it's probably considered a success. The energy expended on making it spin could arguably be better spent on making it fly.

Over 200 University of Central Florida students admitted to cheating on a midterm exam after their professor figured out at least a third of his class had cheated. In a lecture posted on YouTube, Professor Richard Quinn told the students that he had done a statistical analysis of the grades and was using other methods to identify the cheats, but instead of turning the list over to the university authorities he offered the following deal: "I don't want to have to explain to your parents why you didn't graduate, so I went to the Dean and I made a deal. The deal is you can either wait it out and hope that we don't identify you, or you can identify yourself to your lab instructor and you can complete the rest of the course and the grade you get in the course is the grade you earned in the course."

According to this article (cited elsewhere in this thread by acb) about French President Mitterand, PM Thatcher successfully pressured the French to reveal the "codes to make the Exocets deaf and blind" after the Sheffield was sunk.